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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#341

Post by f549abd0 »

Disagree on the point and reasoning about the single database.

Sounds like they experienced badly managed and badly constrained database. The described fks and relations: that's what the key constraints and other guard rails and cascades are for - so that you are able to manage a schema. That's exactly how you do it: add in new tables that reference old data.

I think the regret is actually not managing the database, and not so much about having a single database.

"database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one". How about "database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by everyone".

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#342

Post by matwood »

macNchz wrote: post #195
tw04 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you’re likely a big enough team to have options. By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you've likely got so much momentum that getting off is nearly impossible as you bleed cash. You can buy a used server and find colocation space and still be pennies on the dollar for even the smallest database. If you're doi…

In the small SaaS startup case, I’d say the production database is typically the most critical single piece of infra, so self hosting is just not a compelling proposition unless you have a strong technical reason where having super powerful database hardware is important, or a team with multiple people who have sysadmin or DBA experience. I think both of those cases are unusual. I’ve been the guy managing a critical…

I am good at databases (have been a DBA in the past), and 100% agree with this. RDS is easy to standup and get all the things you mentioned, and not have to think about again. If we grow to the point where the overhead is more than a FT DBA, awesome. It means we are successful, and are fortunate to have options.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#343

Post by eadmund »

> Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA …

I understand, but I think they don’t have the luxury of not having a DBA. Data is important; it’s arguably more important than code. Someone needs to own thinking about data, whether it is stored in a hierarchical, navigation-based database such as a filesystem, a key-value stored like S3 (which, sure, can emulate a filesystem), or in a relational database. Or, for that matter, in vendor systems such as Google Workspace email accounts or Office365 OneDrive.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#344

Post by tester457 »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #152
morsecodist wrote: post #131

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I ha…

I have had the experience of an AWS account manager helping me by getting something fixed (working at a big client). But more commonly, I think the account manager’s job at AWS or any cloud or SAAS is to create a reality distortion field and distract you from how much they are charging you.

> I think the account manager’s job at AWS or any cloud or SAAS is to create a reality distortion field and distract you from how much they are charging you.

How do they do this jedi mind trick?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#345

Post by Draiken »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #292
davedx wrote: post #267

Utter insanity. So much cost and complexity, and for what? Startups don’t think about costs or runway anymore, all they care about is “modern infrastructure”. The argument for RDS seems to be “we can’t automate backups”. What on earth?

Is spending time to make it reliable worth it vs working on your actual product? Databases are THE most critical things your company has.

I see this argument a lot. Then most startups use that time to create rushed half-assed features instead of spending a week on their db that'll end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Forever.

For me that's short-sighted.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#346

Post by matwood »

graemep wrote: post #314
theptip wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just another way of saying the opportunity cost isn’t worth paying to do the migration. Optionality and flexibility are extremely valuable, and that is why cloud compute continues to be popular, especially for rapidly/burstily growing businesses like startups.

People do not really understand the value of the former. Even dealing with financial options (buy/sell and underlying) which are a pure form of it, people either do not understand the value, or do so in a very abstract way they do not intuit.

Good point. And, since you brought up financials, you also see this when people use a majority of their savings to lump sum pay off a mortgage. They take an overweighted view of saving on interest and, IMO, underweight the flexibility of liquidity.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#347

Post by mjfisher »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #57
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer (aka next gen aka Team-managed) Jira projects are pretty solid.

Do jira pages still take 30 seconds to load, and have all the interaction speed of cold molasses? Does it have nice keyboard shortcuts yet? Do I still need to perform an arcane ritual of setup to get the ticket statuses to be what I want? Linear has been such a breath of fresh air, with such a solid desktop app (on Mac OS) that I don’t ever want to go back. Stuff happens instantly , the layout and semantics are an ex…

No, Jira loading is relatively OK and on par with other SPAs. It's got a CTRL+SHIFT+P style actions menu for tickets which helps cut down on point and click pain (especially for linking issues etc). Setting up statues and workflows and how they map to a board is relatively straightforward.

There are lots of things where Jira falls short, but the pain points on an under-resourced self hosted instance of ten years ago are nothing like the ones you'll find on Jira cloud today.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#348

Post by matwood »

nemothekid wrote: post #177
steveBK123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you commit to more deeply Amazon flavored parts of AWS like Aurora, aren't you now fairly committed to hoping your scale never exceeds the cost-benefit tradeoff?

If my scale exceeds the cost benefit tradeoff, then I will thank God/Allah/Buddah/Spaghetti Monster. These questions always sound flawed to me. It's like asking won't I regret moving to California and paying high taxes once I start making millions of dollars? Maybe? But that's an amazing problem to have and one that I may be much better equipped to solve. If you are small, RDS is much cheaper, and many company killin…

Agree. "What if you're wildly successful and get huge?" Awesome, we'll solve the problem then. The other part is what if AWS was a part of becoming successful? IE, it freed my small team from having to worry all that much about a database and instead focused on features.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#349

Post by davedx »

ffsm8 wrote: post #313
davedx wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that infra doesn’t integrate itself. Everywhere I’ve worked that had this kind of stack employed at least one if not a team of DevOps people to maintain it all, full time, the year round. Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird

> Automating a database backup and testing it works takes half a day unless you’re doing something weird True story bro I'm sure that's possible if you're storing the backup on the same server you're restoring on and everything is on top of the line nvme storage. Otherwise your backup just started to run and will need another few days to finish. And that's only if you're running single master. You're massively undere…

I’ve implemented such a process for companies multiple times, bro. I know what I’m talking about.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#350

Post by DeathArrow »

oooyay wrote: post #222
nyc_data_geek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some orgs are looking at moving back to on prem because they're figuring this out. For a while it was vogue to go from capex to opex costs, and C suite people were incentivized to do that via comp structures, hence "digital transformation" ie: migration to public cloud infrastructure. Now, those same orgs are realizing that renting computers actually costs more than owning them, when you're utilizing them to a signif…

Context: I build internal tools and platforms. Traffic on them varies, but some of them are quite active. My nasty little secret is for single server databases I have zero fear of over provisioning disk iops and running it on SQLite or making a single RDBMS server in a container. I've never actually run into an issue with this. It surprises me the number of internal tools I see that depend on large RDS installations…

>making a single RDBMS server in a container

On what disk is the actual data written? How do you do backups, if you do?

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